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Red Harvest (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard)

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Dashiell Hammett took the mystery story out of the drawing room and put it squarely into the American street with his stories of his nameless Continental Detective Agency Private Eye during the 1920's. Known as "the Continental Op" Hammett's hero, a short middle aged, slightly fattish loner was a break from the past as regards mystery stories. Hammett, along with Carroll John Daly and other BLACK MASK MAGAZINE pulp writers revolutionized the detective story with their gritty realism and adventurous stories of gats, guns, and molls.

RED HARVEST is probably the Continental Op's best know adventure, pitting him against the forces of corruption and crime in a small town named Personville. The Op calls the burg "Poisonville" and the cast of villainous characters that he encounters and goes up against make the nickname quite apt.

If you've seen the movies "A Fistful of Dollars", "Last Man Standing", or "Yojimbo" then you have a general idea of what the tale is about. While none of these follows Hammett's intricate plot, the premise of a lone gunman outsmarting and out dueling the whole town is what the story is about. From the time that the Op breezes into town to talk with his client, whom is murdered before the Op can ever meet with him, till the end of the story, there is lots of violence, murder, double dealing and cynical observations by the narrating detective. While we never learn very much about the Op his driven and unswerving dedication to riding the town of any and all opponents takes on the role of obsession and vigilantism by the end of the novel, so much so that the Op himself even begins to have some doubts. Not enough to stop him from completing the job however.

Hammett's spare lean style of writing isn't for everybody, especially those who want in-depth character studies where the protagonist spends a lot of time mulling over the state of the universe and his own personal angst. However if you want action and good tight writing then he's your man. A justly acclaimed classic ever since it came out, this novel is the one that started the "hard boiled" school of writing ball rolling.

"Red Harvest" was author Dashiell Hammett's first novel. The material was not entirely original; it first appeared in serial form in "Black Mask" magazine in 1927-1928 under the title "The Cleansing of Poisonville". Hammett reworked the story into novel form, and "Red Harvest" was published in 1929. This is also the first of Hammett's popular "Continental Op" novels, which feature an unnamed private detective employed by the Continental Detective Agency of San Francisco. "Red Harvest"'s narrator and veteran Continental operative defies any idea of a glamorous or attractive crime fighter. He's short, pot-bellied, alcoholic, and resolutely cynical. He's living in an immoral world, where success comes to those who fight fire with fire. Like all of Hammett's protagonists, he has little use for the law, but lives by a personal code to which he strictly adheres. That doesn't make him especially ethical, only principled. But Hammett's characters, like Hammett himself, are coping in their own way with the widespread corruption that ruled America's cities in the 1920s and 1930s.

"Red Harvest"'s opening paragraph is one of the best hooks I've ever read in a novel. It's fantastic. We are sucked into the mind of our narrator, the unnamed Continental operative, and we want only to read more about this man of such blunt wit. The Continental Op has been called to a town named Personville by the owner of the town's newspaper, Donald Willsson. He doesn't know what the job is, but before he can find out, the client is murdered. So the first order of business is to solve the murder. In doing so, our detective discovers how Personville got its nickname, Poisonville. Everything and everyone in this town is corrupt. Its citizens are ruled by bootleggers and low-lifes who retain their power through indiscriminate violence. Even the town's former boss, Elihu Willsson, a wealthy industrialist who was not above murder in his own day, is now reluctantly under the thumb of the new crop of thugs. Our detective takes offense at Poisonville's powers trying several times to assassinate him in the course of his murder investigation, so he decides to stay and clean up the place. Little did he expect that Poisonville's rampant bloodshed would poison him, as he is seduced by the town's murderous ways.

It's surprising to me that Dashiell Hammett wrote "Red Harvest" years before "The Thin Man". "Red Harvest"'s style seems more developed and its characters better drawn than in the later novel. That's not to say that I don't like "The Thin Man". I actually prefer its more scandalous brand of cynicism. Hammett is always cynical, but sociopathic behavior is to be expected from the characters that inhabit Personville's landscape. They are criminals and police officers (remember, this is the 1920s). The undeniably sociopathic behavior of everyone in "The Thin Man" -from small time con men, to respectable bourgeois, to Park Avenue blue bloods- is like a slap in the face. And so is the book's shameless lack of justice. But perhaps Hammett just chose a different shock tactic in "Red Harvest". The book's greatest cynicism is in the ease with which the Continental Op is seduced into abandoning his own code of conduct when faced with the opportunity to murder without consequences. That's why they call it Poisonville. Fans of noir detective stories wont' want to miss "Red Harvest". There are enough hard-boiled one-liners to inspire glee in those who really enjoy them. Hammett's style is fluid and easy to read. And there is more than one mystery to be solved.

Of all the books written by the chronological trio of Hammett, Chandler, and MacDonald, only Red Harvest seems as honest and truthful now as I am sure it did in 1939. Although Hammett lacks Chandler's writing flare and sarcasm, his style makes for fast-paced, edge of the seat reading. As his Continental Op escapes harrowing situation after another, I was left with a disbelief, but this novel is not about whether the Op could ruin an entire town with merely a scratch. It is instead a commentary on society, and on the cutthroat nature still evident in us all. In so many ways, this novel reminds me of Shirley Jackson's haunting story "The Lottery" because the evil in our world is within the system, and in each person. Just as the Op confesses to wanting to join the killing spree, Hammett has made us want to read about more killing. He dupes us into playing the Op's game. This novel is so much deeper than what can be read in the text. In his own way, he tells us to look out for a system corrupted by greed and a quest for power. Much like Chandler, Hammett always has a message. Heed this one readers, but enjoy the enchantment of this amazing novel.

The Continental Op, an anonymous agent of the Continental Detective Agency, comes to corrupt Personville (aka Poisonville) and investigates a series of murders. In succession he confronts the murder of the publisher of the local paper, the murder of the police chief's brother, and the murder of a beautiful woman. The publisher's father, convinced that local gangsters are responsible for his son's death, employs the Op to break up the organized crime stranglehold on Personville. The Continental Op determines that he cannot quickly destroy the crimelords by lawful means, so he decides to work outside the law to destroy them. The murder of the police chief's son provides him with a golden opportunity to maneuver the rival gangs into lethal conflict. During these investigations, peripheral characters drop like flies as rival gangs feud over turf. The Continental Op continues his investigations, stirs up strife among the gangs, and tries to elude arrest himself as the dance of death lumbers to its bloody denouement. It is near impossible to keep an accurate bodycount through the course of the novel. Despite the carnage, the detective work is excellent, the intrigue is gripping, and the mysteries are satisfying.

This book inspired three movies: Akira Kurosawa's "Yojimbo," the Clint Eastwood oater "A Fistful of Dollars," and the Bruce Willis prohibition era epic "Last Man Standing." I haven't seen "Yojimbo," but the Eastwood and Willis movies hardly compare to "Red Harvest" for complexity and character development. They accentuate the bloodshed and virtually ignore everything else.

Between 1915 and 1922, Dashiell Hammett worked for the Pinkerton Detective Agency, initially from Baltimore's Continental Building office and later in Washington State and California. His experiences for the firm provided the background and the name for the Continental Detective Agency that features in most of his stories and in two of his novels (including "Red Harvest"), and Pinkerton operative James Wright served as the model for the "fat, middle-aged, hard-boiled, pig-headed guy" referred to only as the Continental Op.

In "Red Harvest," the Op is summoned to Personville (known locally as Poisonville), where he is engaged by newspaper publisher Donald Willson, who is murdered before the agent has an opportunity to meet him. At first the novel feels like a traditional murder mystery; in its first half there are two homicides (among more than two dozen gangland-style assassinations) whose clues are scattered for the reader--and the Op--to solve.

Yet the two whodunits are red herrings meant to distract--and entertain--the reader (and crime novel aficionados will figure both of them out within a few paragraphs). Not just a murder mystery, "Red Harvest" pursues broader themes: how corruption and greed poisons the inhabitants of Poisonville, how the Op is able to thwart the ambitions of various criminals by playing their own unprincipled game, and how his own abandonment of professional code nearly destroys the detective himself.

Most of the crooks are stock figures from noir central casting, but the novel's femme fatale, Dinah Brand, is the most memorable. She serves not only as foil to the Op's passionless cynicism but also as a warning to the dangers of the sport: like the Op, she insinuates herself into whichever camp is in control, never dirtying her own hands with the unsavory activities that bring her the money she voraciously accumulates--only to find herself expendable when no faction needs her at all.

During a flirtatious rendezvous with Dinah, the Op slips into a laudanum-induced dream, in which he imagines himself "hunting for a man I hated. I had an open knife in my pocket and meant to kill him." He finds the man and pursues him across a rooftop, where they tussle near the building's edge, only to realize "that I had gone off the edge of the roof with him." When he awakes, The Op--and the reader--discovers just how near the edge of precipice he has crawled, and the remainder of this perceptive book recounts his journey back from the brink.

The story is told by an agent from the Continental Detective Agency. He has been called to the town of Personville or, as he explains, is more aptly named, Poisonville. His client is Donald Willsson, but Willsson is shot and killed before the Continental Op can meet him. He decides to visit Willson's father, Elihu, who until recently ran the town. Elihu Willson winds up hiring the Continental Op to clean up the town by getting rid of the town's 3 criminal bosses. In true gangster-style, the names of the criminals are Max "Whisper" Thaler, Lew Yard and Pete the Finn.

The clean up job becomes the main focus of the rest of the book, although along the way, the Continental Op manages to solve the murder of his original client as well as most other minor crimes that spring up around him. The Continental Op is an interesting character, having no qualms about setting others up, knowingly placing them in mortal danger in order to uncover evidence or confirm his suspicions. He will lie, cheat and double-cross just about anyone.

The deaths come thick and fast and are mentioned off-handedly, almost as an afterthought. Red Harvest is fast moving and entertaining and as hardboiled as they come.

Hammett's Red Harvest is probably the most devastatingly brutal good novel you'll ever read. It's not like slasher movies -- all blood and gore and no content. It's a book about brutal people, both gangsters and politicians, who will do anything to keep their hands on the power that they've managed to get hold of. The Continental Op, Hamett's anonymous detective, finds that the only way to clean up Personville is to join the fray, and though his conscience bothers him, he fights fire with fire and matches the scummy crooks machiavellian move to machiavellian move. What makes the book tick is precisely the bleak, realistic, nihilism of its main characters, who remind one so much of real politicians and crooks, but without any of the spin-doctor sheen that covers their tracks in the media. Red Harvest is a book I read every couple of years to marvel again at fantastic writing and the no-nonsense view of humanity's common, unadorned, ugliness.

The posters for the Bruce Willis blood-fest Last Man Standing credit the original story to Akira Kurosawa's insanely funny destroying-the-town-to-save-it movie Yojimbo (AS IF Bruce Willis had an earthly of filing the blood-and-dust soaked waraji of Mifune). And there, for the majority of movie-goers, no doubt, the story begins and ends. Unless you know Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest. Unless you've ripped through the pages in an agonizing frenzy of suspense and awe, desperate to find out WHAT HAPPENS NEXT but hanging on to each page a second longer to savor the impeccable use of words, the flawless balance between economy and imagery, the sheer perfection of the writing. It's gang warfare in Poisonville, set in motion by the venomous old snake whose bite sickened the town in the first place. Poisonville is an oozing sore ripe for cleaning, and the Continental Op cleans it with a vengeance. Wolf this one down in one gulp the first time through and then start over again at the beginning and linger over the sweet taste of nastiness made delicious through the brilliance of a master word-chef. Hammet perfected the hard-boiled private eye genre even as he invented it. The genre would have been complete had no-one ever written another word in it

For most people, The Maltese Falcon is the first name that enters their mind when you talk about Hammett. But to me, Red Harvest with the Continental Op is the best Hammett ever.

Old gang-town story. Vivid descriptions. Incredibly complicated plot. Action. Drama. Spine chilling twists. Characters. The Language.. oh.. what language. Every phrase designed to excite and to be enjoyed. This book, in a genre that traditional English Depts do not consider as literature, is one of the literary classics of all time.

When a Continental Detective Agency operative arrives in Personville, he little realizes what he's walking into. His employer turns up dead, before the op can even meet with him, so he starts looking into the death. It seems that the deceased, crusading newspaper publisher Donald Willsson, wanted to see Personville (Poisonville, as it's known to anyone familiar with the crooked town) cleaned up. There's two ways to clean up a town, you can go Don Willsson's way, and try to handle everything all legally and above board - and that got him killed. Or, you can turn the bad guys against each other, and let them clean up each other. This Continental op is no push over, and when he wants a job done, he wants it done thoroughly. So before he knows it, he's up to his neck in murder and mayhem!

I love detective stories, and read them all the time. But, Dashiell Hammett is not your everyday mystery writer; he's the originator of the hardboiled detective story. Sherlock Holmes? Hercule Poirot? Jessica Fletcher? Forget it, those birds wouldn't last ten minutes in Poisonville!

This is a great story of murder without conscience, and violence without compunction. This story was first published in 1929, and it is a great story. I love the characters, and the way that they interact. But, even better is the dialogue, including the quote above!

Overall, I think that this is a great story. If you like tough, two-fisted crime fiction, then this is the book for you. It's a great book by the king of his genre!